Recently retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, author of rulings on same-sex marriage and wiretapping, sits with veteran members of the press in the Federal Building to discuss his plans for the future on Wednesday April 6, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif.

Recently retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, author of rulings on same-sex marriage and wiretapping, sits with veteran members of the press in the Federal Building to discuss his plans for the future on

Recently retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, author of rulings on same-sex marriage and wiretapping, sits with veteran members of the press in the Federal Building to discuss his plans for the future on Wednesday April 6, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif. less

Recently retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, author of rulings on same-sex marriage and wiretapping, sits with veteran members of the press in the Federal Building to discuss his plans for the future on ... more

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Prop. 8 judge not surprised by Supreme Court ruling

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Vaughn Walker, the retired federal judge who first struck down California's voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, was working out at the gym when Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Proposition 8 came down.

It was the closest he came to working up a sweat over how the court was going to rule. He wasn't surprised by the decision.

"No, it was pretty clear," Walker said.

The high court effectively allowed Walker's decision to stand - sidestepping the merits of the case and the question of whether same-sex marriage is constitutional. Instead, the court ruled that Prop. 8's backers had no legal standing to appeal his 2010 ruling throwing out the initiative.

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Walker, 69, said he anticipated that Justice Anthony Kennedy wanted to address the merits of the Prop. 8 case - and indeed, Kennedy wrote the dissenting opinion Wednesday. But he also anticipated that Kennedy had no more than three justices with him, and that a potential swing justice - Ruth Bader Ginsburg- was unlikely to go along.

Ginsburg, Walker noted, wrote the court's 1996 decision in an Arizona case in which an initiative's backers had sought to defend the measure in court when the state refused to do so. Ginsburg and the court ruled they had no standing.

Persuading Ginsburg to let Prop. 8's backers appeal his ruling when Gov. Jerry Brownand Attorney General Kamala Harrisrefused to, Walker said, "would have been a pretty steep hill to climb. And obviously they weren't able to do it."

So how does Walker feel about having his name attached to what looks to be a historic case?

"I don't know that it feels much different than the other kinds of decisions I've been involved in," he said.

He did note, however, that there were few other cases in his career in which he was pestered by reporters and had questions raised "about my personal life."

Walker is gay, something that was an open secret in legal and political circles but unknown to the public at large until we reported it in February 2010 while he was hearing the Prop. 8 case in San Francisco federal court.

Was this case special for him?

"You may be skeptical - it really wasn't," he said. "My job was to try the case and give the parties an opportunity to present their evidence and to make their arguments. And that's what I tried to do - I tried to divorce any personal feelings that I had."

And just in case you were wondering, Walker won't be celebrating at this weekend's Pride parade.